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Canada’s newest astronauts want to pass on passion for space

ST-HUBERT, QC—It was Dr. Roberta Bondar who first forced four year old Jennifer Sidey’s eyes up into the skies when she went into space with NASA’s Discovery mission in 1992.

So it was only fitting that Canada’s newest female astronaut would have been welcomed to the elite club of high flyers by the country’s first female astronaut after she and Joshua Kutryk were unveiled as the winners of a year-long recruitment process that involved more than 3,700 candidates.

In an Ottawa hotel lobby over the weekend the duo, accompanied by current astronaut Jeremy Hansen, were welcomed to the team in person by Dave Williams, who travelled to space in 1998 and 2007.

“I felt like I was six years old again,” said Kutryk, a 35-year-old air force test pilot, at the Canadian Space Agency headquarters in St-Hubert, Que.

“It was a very humbling experience to see that Canadian space hero in person and think about how that is the pair of shoes we are trying to fill now,”

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Right after that encounter, Sidey was handed a telephone with Bondar on the other end. The experience transported the 28-year-old mechanical engineer and combustion scientists from Calgary back to life as a four-year-old girl pasting newspaper articles about Bondar’s mission into a scrapbook with her mother and building a rocket ship out of toilet-paper rolls.

Canada's newest astronauts Jennifer Sidey and Joshua Kutryk speak with astronaut Jeremy Hansen, right, during a visit to the Canadian Space Agency in Saint-Hubert, Que. (Graham Hughes / THE CANADIAN PRESS)

“I don’t even think I remember what I said,” Sidey recounted of the telephone call.

In an interview with the Star, Bondar said she told Sidey to enjoy every moment of the experience and to never lose sight of her childhood dream.

“Sometimes there will be moments in the future when there will be doubts. There are times when one questions oneself. You’d be pretty abnormal if you didn’t. But I just really wanted to encourage her to remember the times when she had the energy, curiosity and enthusiasm, to remember why she wanted to do these things.”

Bondar said she was touched to hear Sidey pay tribute to her own accomplishments on the Canada Day stage because it shows that a legacy is forming in Canada—particularly among women, who are grossly underrepresented among the world’s astronauts.

“With Julie (Payette) taking two flights and me taking one flight, it’s really not very many,” Bondar said. “In the future, hopefully Jennifer will be one of the astronauts to go to the moon and she will continue this legacy and she will be a role model for new generations.”

As if to underscore that point, Canadian Space Agency employees were encouraged to bring their kids to work Tuesday to welcome Sidey and Kutryk to their new home base where they met their new work family.

A question-and-answer session was also dedicated to questions from young people in the audience and via Facebook.

Much has changed in the years since Bondar was unveiled to the country in December 1983 as one of Canada’s first group of six astronauts and the fine-tuned affair over the past few days to welcome the country’s newest pair of astronauts.

Back then, Bondar said there was such intense interest that media were camped out at the Ottawa airport jostling to get the first sighting of the astronauts as they were flown in. Instead, they were flown to Montreal and driven to Ottawa for the unveiling.

“It was Cloak-and-Dagger style,” she said.

But the preparations were more haphazard. Bondar and the other astronauts wore brown air-force jump suits without crests, or name tags.

“People were trying to glue on maple leafs (to the suit),” she said.

The selection and training process was different too.

“Nobody knew what they were doing in terms of what people needed for space so it was basically throw out a net and see what you can catch,” Bondar said. “The new people had to have degrees, not be afraid of heights or be claustrophobic and have decent communication and interpersonal skills, scientific skills, etcetera.”

Those selected had Canadian-based training programs, rather than the current NASA-run training out of Houston, Texas. When Marc Garneau was selected as the first to go into space, the rest of the team followed along with his training regimen.

The year-long process that culminated this weekend in the selection of Sidey and Kutryk, might have made for a popular reality-television series.

Kutryk said there were two broad areas—physical and mental abilities—around which the testing focused.

“The most difficult times over the last year have been when they really compbine those two,” he said, providing just one lung-busting example.

“Solving puzzles, while you’re at the bottom of a pool, while approaching minute two of one breath hold. It’s difficult stuff like that where you’re having to do difficult cognitive work while operating at the boundaries of your physical abilities.”

Both Kutryk and Sidey held their breaths, solved the puzzles and earned their blue astronaut jump suits. In a few weeks they will move into their news homes at NASA headquarters to begin a two-year basic training course under the leadership of Canada’s Jeremy Hansen.

Bondar speaks from experience when she says that their lives are “changed absolutely, forever.”

But they are also now armed with the power to inspire and direct the lives and dreams of the next generation of astronauts.

“What I have is this hope that we will have Canadian astronauts on the surface of the moon as part of the international community,” she said, remembering her own excitement at seeing America’s moon-walkers as a child.

“I didn’t think it was possible because they were Americans but I can assure you that if there was a Canadian on the moon I would be thinking a little differently.”

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